Human Dignity and Human Rights Law

Check out this overview of the concept of human dignity in human rights discourse and law, by leading scholar Christopher McCrudden (with frequent nods to MOJ friend Paolo Carozza).  Excerpts:

      [A]lthough we see judges often speaking in terms of "common principles for a common humanity," in practice this is rhetoric, however well intentioned and sincere. The apparently common recognition of the worth of the human person as a fundamental principle to which the positive law should be accountable in fact covers up the use of dignity in human rights adjudication to incorporate theoretically significantly different approaches to the meaning and implications of such worth, enabling the incorporation of just the type of ideological, religious and cultural differences that a common theory of human rights would need to transcend. The "common enterprise" that I identified in my earlier article is not “the working out of the practical implications, in differing concrete contexts, of human dignity for the rights to life and physical integrity,” as Carozza would have it (Carozza, at 1081-2), but rather the use of the concept of human dignity to provide an apparently universalistic and principled surface justification for an enterprise that is better understood in functionalist terms. . . .

      [Dignity’s role], in practice, is to enable local context to be incorporated under the appearance of using a universal principle. Dignity, in the judicial context, not just permits the incorporation of local contingencies in the interpretation of human rights norms, it requires it to an extent that the ideal of universalism is severely undermined. Dignity remains as a place-holder but in the judicial context it is a place holder that allows each jurisdiction to develop its own theory of human rights.

Tom